Two workers who suffered age-related discrimination when their employers forced them into retirement have jointly received more than €80,000 in compensation.
According to the Independent, the Workplace Relations Commission has ordered the Wheelchair Association of Ireland to pay its former employee Patrick McInerney €31,830 after he was forced to retire without cause at the age of 66.
Separately, a University of Limerick consultant, Michael O’Mahony, who hoped to work until the age of 70 but whose employment ended at 68, will receive €50,000 in compensation.
Both men had lodged complaints under the Employment Equality Act 1998 alleging age discrimination, both complaints having been upheld by the court in published decisions.
The University of Limerick case followed a dispute over the employment status of a group of student advisers following inquiries by the Revenue Commissioners and the Scope Department of the Department of Social Protection in 2018, which led the complainant to be placed on payroll the following year, reports the Indepedent.
Staff at the university’s human resources department told him in September 2019 that he needed to retire within two weeks because he was over 65, the public sector retirement age for employees who started before 2004. he said.
Lui said after engaging his lawyer he was allowed to continue working and expected to stay until he was 70, but was sacked in January 2021 while on sick leave.
According to the Independent, Judge Bríd Deering wrote that it was ““well established that the imposition of a mandatory retirement age is discriminatory” and that the university had produced “no evidence” that it was required to do so under the 1956 Civil Service Act, which it had claimed .
Mr O’Mahony’s mandatory retirement amounts to a “discriminatory dismissal on grounds of age”, she wrote, and asked the university to pay him €50,000 in compensation.
Meanwhile, Patrick McInerney told the court the Irish Wheelchair Association had suspended the service from which he was fired at the start of the pandemic.
It informed him and a colleague of the decision in August 2020, he said.
Adjudicating officer Kevin Baneham held that the dismissal was “clearly age-related” and that the Wheelchair Association of Ireland could provide no “objective justification” for Mr McInerney’s termination of employment.
Referring to the termination agreement of one of Mr. McInerney and the transfer of another, Mr. Baneham wrote: “Neither course was offered to the complainant because of his age,” reports Independent.
He ordered disability charity to pay him €31,830 “for the effects of discrimination.”
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